by Muriel Gray
The third thing awake was in the kitchen.
Its memory was a little more fragmented, but clear nevertheless.
“Come on then, boy, here it is.”
A lifetime ago, before they had gone to bed, Katie had put the dish down for the husky. It stared at her, ignoring the food. She looked up at Sam, who was watching the dog as if he’d never seen one before. “Can you believe that?”
“No,” croaked Sam.
She had bent down and grabbed Bart’s coat with both hands. “So, fella! You burst in demanding to be fed and then turn your nose up at it, huh? Well, tough. You only get one chance in this house.”
She had buried her face in his fur, and over the top of her head the dog looked at Sam. It was not the look of a low mammal weighing its master. It was something else. Katie surfaced from the warm fur.
“Hey. I wonder if he’s OK. Do you think he looks sick?”
“No. He looks OK.”
“Well, maybe we should keep him in tonight. I’m not going to let Billy have him, in case there’s something wrong with him.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Worms or something. Do I look like a vet? He can stay in here.” She grabbed him again, looking into the dog’s piercing blue eyes with concern. “Yes, you can, my darling. Stay in here where it’s nice and warm.”
“I think he should be outside.”
Katie had looked at Sam with surprise. He was usually the one who treated Bart as if he were the third baby in the house. She would have to hit Sam on the head with a baseball bat to get him to clear the drive of snow for the humans in this house, but he was always out there at Bart’s kennel, making sure he had a nice flat clear patch in front of his little arched door from which to survey the world.
“Let him stay in, huh? Think how you’d feel if there is something wrong with him.”
Bart had looked at Sam with that look. The one that was making his guts churn. But Sam was tired. He wasn’t functioning properly anymore. He was imagining ridiculous stuff. “Sure. If you think it’s necessary. Remember, he’s a husky. He’s happier outside.”
Katie shook the dog by its big, thick neck again. “Well, you get to be happy inside tonight, don’t you?” She got up, filled a bowl with water and put it down beside the untouched dog food. “There. Don’t die in the night of overheating or I’ll be in big trouble.”
They left the kitchen and Sam put the light out.
It didn’t much matter to Bart whether he was inside or outside. He was screaming and barking and yelping deep inside his own body. Trying to bite blindly at something strong and dark and terrifying that was moving his limbs, and seeing through his eyes. Bart shrieked in horror with the punishment of it, but no one heard his cries. His body crouched down silently and sat with its paws out front. Bart screamed as his vocal chords that he used for barking and growling and whining were manipulated into a hideously painful contortion that he couldn’t begin to understand, and from its own jaws came a sound that made the dog inside writhe in agony.
“Good night, Sam.”
“Well, really because Staff Sergeant Becker said he thought you’d want to deal with it. That’s why, sir.”
Bell waited as Craig shuffled some papers angrily. So, Edmonton thought he was too close to be involved in the hunt for the maniac who was giving Silver detachment a staff shortage problem, but Becker thought he was good enough to speak to the grieving relatives? Cheap. Really cheap. Some poor woman cop in Calgary had done the deed with Tess Hawk last night. He was thankful for that. But now Sean Bradford’s parents were here from California, fighting off the press and fighting back their grief, desperate to speak to the men who had dealt with their boy.
“Fine. Don’t leave them standing out there. Let’s have them in.” He stood and waited for them with the door open.
Bell led them through, and asked about coffee in a quiet voice. They refused, and he shut the door behind him.
They looked so young. Two tanned, fit young people.
The dark-haired woman couldn’t have been more than about thirty-eight or thirty-nine, and the man only a year or two older. Their cold-weather clothes were all new. He could see one of those little plastic T-shaped things that had held the label still sticking out of the man’s anorak collar. He imagined their friends bringing them the clothes in mall bags, to get them ready for their trip to Canada, where the bits of their boy were waiting for them.
“Mr. and Mrs. Bradford, I’m Staff Sergeant McGee.” He put out a hand and they shook it, the woman as if she were in a dream, the man as though the hand could bring Sean back.
Craig pulled the chair from against the wall to join the one at his desk, and motioned for them to sit down. “There’s not much I can say, except how sorry I am, and how hard we’re working to bring your son’s killer to justice.”
The woman was all cried out. She looked at him numbly, probably sedated. But there was still fight in the man. “I hope for his sake you find him before I do, Mr. McGee.”
The sad, empty threat of a grieving, impotent father.
“Uh-huh. Well, we will, sir. It takes time.”
“How much time?”
“Too much time, Mr. Bradford. Every minute he’s loose out there is a minute too long.”
That threw the father. They were in agreement. The man hung his head and looked like he would cry now. Craig carried on in a calm tone. “In the meantime we’re here to help you in any way we can, particularly in keeping the press from you, if that’s what you want.”
The father looked at Craig with an expression that told him it was too late. He’d obviously made that mistake and spoken to them. He didn’t blame them. It would have been hard not to. The hyenas were waiting for them the moment they’d stepped off the plane.
Craig continued. “Now, I have to tell you before you hear it on the news that there’s been a third murder. It looks like it happened the same day that Sean died.”
The name of their son. It made her tears come at last. Mrs. Bradford started to weep, her husband’s arm slipping around her shoulders. “Yes, we heard. We’re sorry.”
Aha, thought Craig. I’ll bet you heard, all right. From the same scumbag reporter, no doubt, who offered you sympathy and an exclusive.
Grieving people should be protected from these animals. They’d lost their judgment. Spoke confidentially and intimately to people they wouldn’t normally wipe their ass on.
Sean Bradford’s mother was hard at it now, trying to get the words out as she choked on her tears.
“Why Sean? It was obviously a mistake. I mean Sean’s not… Sean’s… Sean was only dressed like an Indian, for God’s sake.”
Craig’s stomach did a flip. My God. So that was the story out there, was it? An Indian killer. He looked at them wearily and wished he could think of something to say.
“Which interview room are they in?”
The Edmonton man looked surprised. “Uh, the end one. What’s that? Number three?”
“Four, Sergeant,” Craig snapped at him without looking back as he marched toward it.
“Sir.”
The stupid shits. Wilber didn’t kill anyone. Why the fuck did they bring him in? But they had, and Craig had only just heard that they had. This was going to turn political if they screwed up.
He didn’t knock. Screw them all. It was still his detachment. Still his interview room. Becker threw him a look like Craig had come in with his shorts over his head. Craig ignored him, closed the door and leaned against the expanse of plain plaster wall. The two other men, Sergeant Park and the quivering wreck that was Wilber Stonerider, looked up briefly and then resumed their dialogue.
“Go on, Wilber,” said Park pointedly.
“Can’t I get no smokes?”
“No. Concentrate. Two nights ago.”
Wilber had been crying. His filthy face was streaked with the wake of his tears and he looked at the familiar face of Craig for sympathy. He found none. “I told you. I be s
leepin’ rough. I be in the train yard, sleepin’ over them air vents that come up from the basement at the back. Keeps me warm.”
“But no one saw you?”
“ ‘Course not. They’d have moved me on.”
Park looked up at Becker, then back to Wilber with a sigh. “And was this talking bird there? In the train yard?”
Wilber’s face contorted at the mention of it, and he looked like he was going to start blubbering again. “No, sir. He don’t come that night and I be real scared in case he do. He been a rat, too, once.”
“A rat spoke to you as well?”
“Yeah. He was laughin’ at me with those beady little eyes and he be sayin’ real sick stuff about my baby son that passed away years since.”
“The things the bird said, Wilber. About your heart and your… your pecker. What was that?”
It was pathetic. The patronizing tone he was using to this man. As if he couldn’t say penis to him. Craig shifted his weight onto his other foot in irritation.
“Was like I said already. Said they be the parts of a man that should fuck each other. Said that should happen to me. Me. He was comin’ for me.” He sobbed and clutched at the old torn blue parka that hung around his shoulders like it had been grafted on.
Becker looked at Craig with satisfaction, as if this was it, the reason they’d pulled in a poor drunken old man in full view of the world’s press. Craig had seen enough. He turned to the door and put his hand on the handle when Wilber spoke again through his weeping, like he was speaking to himself.
“That be filthy talk. Filthy talk. He be knowin’ the real rhyme.”
Craig stopped and looked back. “What rhyme?”
The old man sniffed, wiped his nose and said something in his own language. “In English, Wilber.”
“It don’t rhyme in English.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Wilber looked at the table. “Kinchuinick mothers. They always be sayin’ it to their boys before they’s becomin’ men. It goes somethin’ like ‘A man gives life with his penis but he be having to live life with his heart.’ It rhymes good in Siouan.”
Craig looked at the man for a moment, then opened the door and left. He was not quite at his office when Becker caught him.
“Did your uninvited visit there convince you?”
He was obviously angry at Craig’s intrusion. Tough. Daniel was dead. Joe was dead. The son of those two bewildered, broken people was dead. Craig turned and faced him. They were in the middle of the office, and if he wanted an audience, fine.
“Yep. Real convincing.”
Becker raised an eyebrow. “Good.”
“Convinced me that you’ve pulled in a sad old dipso, and that right now there are twenty reporters out there busting their asses to find a word that means murder to rhyme with the word Indian for tomorrow’s headlines.”
Becker was calm in the face of his younger colleague’s anger. He smiled, well aware of the arena they were in. He rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms. “How many murder investigations have you led, Staff Sergeant McGee?”
“Jesus.”
“How many?”
Craig put his hand on his hips. It was as well his gun was hanging on the chair in his office, or the action would have looked like he was going to draw and shoot.
“One.”
“One. Well, I reckon that’s pretty standard for a policeman in a small country town.” He enjoyed emphasizing those last three words. “Want to know how many I’ve led?”
“Let me guess. The first was when you were six and you figured it was Jack who bumped off the giant.”
Someone laughed. Becker ignored it. He had the upper hand and they both knew it. “Seventeen. That’s how many, McGee. Including solving the West Coast Beach Murders.”
Craig laughed, hating himself for the anger that Becker had raised in him. Be nice, remember? No. He’d forgotten. “Yeah, that was a tough one, huh? Whoever would have guessed that the guy on the beach burger stand with a twitch and a fifteen-year rape record would turn out to be the one? Now, that’s good police work.” He’d gone too far.
“And getting an autopsy ordered on a fucking dead deer is good police work? Did you think I wouldn’t know?”
Craig looked Becker full in the face. This was not a stupid man. It was just a supremely untalented one. They were the worst. They lived their lives trying not to be found out. “Call me suspicious. I was never sure about Jack. I’d have fingerprinted the beanstalk.” He held Becker’s gaze for a beat, turned his back on him and left to fetch his jacket from the office. Shit. Thanks a lot, Officer Bell. So much for staff loyalty.
He was going out. He had a lot to think about.
“Tell them to fuck off and die. You can paraphrase me.”
Margaret put the phone down, staring at it as though it had turned into something other than a piece of plastic. She looked back up at the man and woman in big, chunky sheepskin coats and cleared her throat.
“I’m sorry. Mrs. Hunt is tied up right now. She can’t see you.”
“Aw, come on. This won’t take a minute.” The man’s face was pleading, insistent.
“I’m sorry.”
The couple looked at each other, then the small dark-haired woman with the hard face leaned on Margaret’s counter and smiled. She was much prettier when she smiled, but Margaret thought she looked as if it didn’t happen often.
“Well, how about you? You know Mr. Hunt? We just need to ask all the Ind… all the Native Canadian residents in Silver if they’re scared that the killer will strike again. What do you think? Is he scared? Taking any special precautions?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Spells, maybe? Something like that?”
“Can you go, please? We get busy soon.”
The man looked around the empty museum foyer. “Got the crowd barricades ready?”
The man turned back to her, laughing unpleasantly as he opened the glass door. “Hey, there’s fights starting in the line out here.”
Margaret watched them go, then stuck out a tongue.
In the safety of the back office, Katie took off her round black spectacles and rubbed her eyes. Her heart had sunk when Margaret said there were journalists at the desk asking about Sam. What now? she’d thought. False alarm. It had been nothing. Just two dumb jerks looking for a story about Indians in Silver. Tenuous, even for a tabloid journalist, she thought, to make an Indian thing out of two deaths, when only one was a Native, and even then only half-Native.
She put an elbow on her book and held her chin in her hand. This morning, Katie had gotten up feeling like she was still in a bad dream. She shifted in her chair, the physical reminder of her horror still aching in between her thighs.
The stuff Sam had told her last night was so unexpected, so hideous and tragic, she still couldn’t believe it was real. And then that brutality. She changed the hand at her chin to a fist and covered her mouth.
Bart was the next problem. He was sick. The big dog was lying next to a pool of vomit and he looked up at them with sad, wounded eyes when they came in. Billy ran to him and Bart panted with as much excitement as he could manage in his washed-out state.
Billy was distraught, but Katie promised she’d take him to the vet as soon as she dropped him off at school, and after she’d deposited Jess at Mrs. Chaney’s she was as good as her word. The antiseptic-looking receptionist at the vet’s said they’d keep him and look at him, and she could pick him up tonight. She could see the girl thinking big bucks, and Katie sighed, thinking of the bill.
Katie let Sam sleep late. It was spiteful: she knew he would be late for work, but as she watched his body rise and fall under the comforter, her heart grew a shell of stone. She’d turned away and left the room without a sound.
So the Hunt household was back under her tight control, on the surface. This feeling of unreality, of everything being different and somehow broken, was still strong in her, and she was damned if she could
shrug it off. It made her want to cry. Damned if she would again, though. Damned if she would.
She put her spectacles back on and looked down at Nicholson’s book. There it was. The Isksaksin. A beautiful pen-and-ink drawing of the exact amulet Sam wore. He said so little about it, but then, Nicholson was more concerned with domestic artifacts than the occult. She looked up the bibliography. A pamphlet was mentioned that looked promising. The big reference library in Vancouver could probably help her get it. She noted down the details, wrote a big note to Margaret to get the pamphlet faxed through and closed the book.
The phone warbled again. It was Margaret. Katie listened with a frown. “Yeah. Sure. Send him along.”
She hoped her voice had sounded calm. Because she was trying to stay very calm now as she gently replaced the receiver. Jesus. Craig McGee. Another policeman with more bad news…
She took off her spectacles and sat at the desk like a headmistress, hands clasped tightly in front of her. She saw his dark shape through the opaque glass and shouted, “Come in,” before he got a chance to knock.
Craig entered with a smile, his hand that was going to tap the glass held up for her in jest, as evidence of her good timing.
“Hi! Sit down.”
He sat on the old black-leather swivel chair in front of her desk.
“Am I catching you at a bad time?”